Simply like us or friend us on Facebook or become a Twitter follower with a mention of my newest book, Wind Up Hearts, and be entered into a raffle for a coffee mug with the outstanding cover artwork for the book.

If one’s heart is constructed of metal and considered indestructible, can love and romance still find a place within?

That is the question facing Henry Thackery who spends over a hundred years pursuing the woman of his dreams—Emily Harding. After Henry and Emily become recipients of the Merganthol Circulatory Assistance Device, we follow their journey from 1875 to the present day and Henry’s unflinching quest to convince Emily (the love of his life) to become his bride.

Will Henry be successful in his pursuit of love or will Emily ultimately “break” his indestructible heart?

A tale of romance more than science fiction, Wind-Up Hearts will tug at the strings of your heart whether it be mechanical or flesh and blood.

This interview was conducted by Max Booth III as part of a series on Dark Moon Digest’s blog, Last Writes and was published on Halloween 2013.

1) Why did you begin Dark Moon Digest?

I’ve always loved horror stories. I hung around with a guy named Moses for a while and he had some great tales about staffs turning into serpents and rivers turning into blood. I thought it would be cool to collect some of those horror tales and distribute them amongst the people. However, it didn’t seem practical at the time. I mean, Moses was carrying around information on these huge stone tablets. So I figured I’d better wait. Can you imagine the postage on those suckers? The time felt right a few millennium later. I believe it was October of 2010. Hopefully we’ll still be around another century or two. That, of course, all depends on when the actual zombie apocalypse arrives.

2) How has it survived all this time?

Well, we tried throwing it in a canvas bag and tossing it into a lake, but that didn’t work. Luckily it couldn’t fall asleep (it’s a book after all) so Freddy Kruger didn’t have a shot at it either. I guess it’s like a cat. Without the hairballs, but still has nine lives. I think we’ve used up six or seven of those lives to date, so it’s up to you to save the world and buy a few issues. It’s worth every gold bar you send our way. (We’ll even pay the postage as we know gold weighs a lot.) Or you can buy it at our website, our blog or even at online bookstores like Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

3) Did it go in the direction you originally intended?

We originally wanted it to go in a southeasterly direction, but it headed north by northwest. Probably a Hitchcock fan. Nowadays it just seems to wander in whatever direction the wind blows. It is made out of paper after all. Hmmmm. . . . guess I could have used papyrus scrolls way back then instead of stone tablets, couldn’t I? Oh, well, water under the bridge.)

4) Tell us about Dark Moon Books

First of all, I want to know who “us” is. For all I know these questions could be coming from the CIA or FBI or Edward Snowden or even Rush Limbaugh. Jeez, I could end up in Guantanamo Bay or finding myself on the “Small World” ride at Disney on an endless loop. (Ha! Now try and get that song out of your head for the rest of the day!) Other than that you can also use gold bars to buy the dozens of Dark Moon titles currently available.

5) What is the future of DMB and DMD?

Our current plan is to place implants into all newborns. The implant will activate when they reach the appropriate age and all Dark Moon Digest stories will be delivered directly to their cerebral cortex.
Now, about the question that wasn’t asked. Does the Devil really play the fiddle and did he actually go to Georgia? I have my doubts. I see him more as a saxophone player.
Oh, yeah, and Stephen King. I only mention him in the hope that web bots scouring the internet will find his name and get our site a few more hits.
Swanson, out! (Take that, Ryan Seacrest . . . )

I am very pleased to announce Mr. Stan Swanson, my next guest as we count down the days until the September 3rd release of my next zombie novel, The Savage Dead. Mr. Stan Swanson is a Bram Stoker award finalist and the author of eight books including Forever Zombie (a collection of short stories), Write of the Living Dead (a highly-praised writing guide written with Araminta Star Matthews and Rachel Lee) and Return of the Scream Queen (co-authored with Michael McCarty and Linnea Quigley). He is also editor/publisher for Dark Moon Books and Dark Moon Digest.

I first became aware of Stan Swanson through his humorous short story collection, Forever Zombie. Like my interview subject from yesterday, Scott Kenemore, Stan uses the zombie’s potential for dark humor with great effect. But there’s always an unsettling aspect to humorous zombies. We want to laugh, and we do laugh, most of the time, but there remains that nagging feeling in the back of the brain that we are laughing at our own mortality. That tone buoys up much of the best of the humorous zombie sub-genre, and Stan has long since proven himself a master of that delicate balance between humor and unsettling self-realization.

Stan didn’t stop with humor, though. Don’t get me wrong. It continues to flavor much of his later work, but it is by no means the leading note these days. Perhaps this is due to his editing skills, which is how I next encountered him. I read his non-fiction book, Write of the Living Dead, and found an editorial guide that reminded me of the bastard love child of George Romero and Strunk & White. After that, I knew Stan was one to watch.

I have since published several short stories through Stan’s publishing company, Dark Moon Books / Dark Moon Digest, and I did it because of how impressed I was with Stan. One of those stories, in fact, a flash fiction piece called “Sabbatical in the Ohio Methlands,” has morphed into a novel, one that Stan and I are currently co-writing. You’ll be hearing more about that next year.

For now, enjoy the words of my good friend, Stan Swanson.

Joe McKinney: Thanks for joining me here on Old Major’s Dream. I’m glad you could swing by. You’re no stranger to zombie fiction. Would you mind telling the folks out there a little about your zombie-related writing? How do you approach the genre?

Stan Swanson: I have written off-and-on most of my life, but I never seriously gave much thought to writing about zombies until about five years ago. I’ve loved zombie movies since the first time I saw Night of the Living Dead many decades ago, but realized I had never heard much about zombie fiction. Research revealed many titles in the genre, but not near as many as one might expect. I tried my hand and wrote a short story titled “Every Death You Take” which became the first story in my short fiction collection, Forever Zombie. I was “true” to the original Romero archetype zombie—slow-moving, non-thinking creatures—but that didn’t last as I quickly realized that “sticking” to this formula closed too many doors to the creative process. Now I approach each zombie work and the zombies within as characters just as I do all of my characters in the hope that they are not always quite what you expect. I think you will find that very true with the “zombies” appearing in the book I am currently co-writing with Joe McKinney.

JM: The zombie apocalypse is happening right now. Are you prepared? Would humanity win?

SS: The only thing I am really prepared for is a hurricane and I’m not even 100% prepared for that. The one thing I am really good at is procrastinating. Hey, it took me almost two weeks to answer Joe’s list of questions. Humanity has always found a way to survive, but it is usually through dumb luck. People use their heads fairly well as individuals, but the more people you throw into the mix, the less well we fare. We would likely survive the zombie apocalypse, but not because we are collectively brilliant.

JM: What’s your favorite zombie book, movie, short story, whatever? (Please feel free to ramble as much or as little as you like here. I’d love to know why that story or movie or whatever grabs you.)

SS: Night of the Living Dead started it all. I’d never even really been a huge horror fan until I saw that. The only zombie movie I have probably watched more times is the original Dawn of the Dead. I am one of those individuals who enjoy humor mixed with my horror and Dawn of the Dead never got old.

JM: What’s your favorite zombie kill scene of all time?

SS: My favorite scene is the garden scene from Shaun of the Dead which begins with the lady falling on the pipe, continues with Shaun and Ed throwing everything at the zombies but the kitchen sink and ends with them throwing vinyl disks. Not sure they ever killed any zombies, but it was a classic scene.

JM: I’ve always felt the best and most effective horror is trying to investigate what we think of ourselves and what it means to be us. Washington Irving’s tales, for instance, generally grapple with the question of what it means to be an American in the post-Revolutionary War period. Nathaniel Hawthorne battled with the intellectual promise of a nation rising to international credibility while simultaneously choking under the yolk of a Puritan past. Stephen King made a name for himself chronicling the slow collapse of the American small town way of life. What do you think the zombie and its current popularity is telling us about ourselves?

SS: There is probably no truer representation of humanity than through the zombie stereotype. We’ve seen it in everything from books and movies to television commercials. I’ve been repeatedly told that the zombie genre is dying, but I haven’t seen that happening. It is one of the few monster genres that people can personally relate to. Werewolves. Swamp creatures. Blobs from outer space. It is always us against them. But it is not always that way with zombies because each of us can identify with the monster. All we have to do is look into the mirror.